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Catholics in Cuba: A muted holy day

USATODAY
Published 12:06 a.m. CT Dec. 27, 2014

Hundreds of Cubans attend a morning Mass in a Catholic church in Havana on Christmas Day.(Photo: Alan Gomez, / USA TODAY)

Havana – Gloria Gomez remembers the day she lost out on a job because she showed up to the interview with a cross hanging from her necklace.

It was 1970, at the peak of Cuban leader Fidel Castro's crackdown on Catholic Church institutions around the island. Gomez said she not only lost the secretary job, but also friends who either renounced their religion to appease the communist government or didn't want to be associated with someone so outspoken about religion.

Gomez, 72, never backed down. She kept going to church. She brought out a Nativity scene and a small, plastic Christmas tree in her home each December.

She watched as Castro's government slowly allowed Catholics to practice their religion more freely and as Pope Francis helped broker last week's deal to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.

Thursday, she joined dozens of others who have maintained their Catholic faith to celebrate Christmas Day Mass in a central Havana church, a cross still hanging around her neck.

"It's so beautiful to see religion blooming again," said Gomez (no relation to this reporter).

Christmas in Cuba is far different from the U.S. version. The holiday is celebrated here, but it's muted. There are no real Christmas trees. Hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists hung twinkling lights and other decorations for the holiday, but few homes or businesses did the same.

Because of widespread poverty on the island, there are few families who can afford to pile up gifts for their children. Gomez survives on her government pension.

The Catholic Church has always held an uncomfortable position in Castro's Cuba.

Castro — baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and graduated from a Jesuit high school in Havana — went on to shut the doors of most religious institutions around the country after he assumed power in 1959 and created a communist government.

Marciano Garcia, a priest who has led churches in the central city of Matanzas and now Havana, said it wasn't as simple as Castro cracking down on the church. At the time, the Catholic Church had taken a position to excommunicate communists from its ranks, so Garcia said Castro's decision to fight the church was no surprise.

People who wouldn't denounce their religion were barred from joining the Communist Party, meaning they faced a tough road to secure the good, state-run jobs or attend state-run universities.

Though Cuba confiscated churches for government use, Garcia said Castro never shut all the doors. Many remained open, albeit in an awkward situation, stuck between those Catholics who continued practicing their faith and communist officials intent on diminishing their ranks.

Garcia said he received death threats from anti-Castro counter-revolutionaries for simply maintaining a dialogue with the government, as well as threats of prison from Castro's officials.

"I was denounced for supporting the revolution and denounced for attacking the revolution," Garcia, 80, said, laughing at the position he was in. "I felt like Christ between the two thieves."

Garcia said churchgoers were constantly ridiculed and questioned by government officials. "The terror, the horror that they came to me with," he said, his voice trailing off. "People would confess to me that they were communists. Many left."

A small core kept going to church, and Garcia said that helped them endure more than five decades of economic ruin and despair. Still, the church ranks dwindled. As more people left the island for the USA and others decided it wasn't worth the hassle, church attendance fell dramatically in Cuba.

Yancey Ruiz, 33, said he has only one relative who is a practicing Catholic. "And I've got a big family, so that should tell you something," he said.

Ruiz said the practicing Catholics left in Cuba are mostly from the older generation, the ones who practiced it before Castro's revolution triumphed. He said few people of his generation ever embraced Catholicism.

"It just wasn't part of our culture growing up," he said.

Although most people in Cuba celebrate Christmas Eve with a big dinner, Ruiz said that has more to do with family, rum and dancing than any celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

"It's a party," he said.

Cubans settled into that situation for years. Many continued going to church, many more stayed away. Some practiced the island's Santería religion, an Afro-Cuban mix that has become the most identifiable religious affiliation to those outside of Cuba.

Then came 1998.

"Everything changed after the pope came," said Gerardo Mitchell, 57, a promoter in Havana.

Pope John Paul II's visit served as a total shock. Castro shook hands with the pope, even trading in his military uniform for a business suit for the occasion. Castro allowed more open expressions of religion and even agreed to make Christmas Day a national holiday for the first time. After Pope Benedict XVI visited in 2012, Good Friday became a national holiday as well.

"Now you can practice whatever you want," said Mitchell, who admits he practices both Catholicism and Santería.

Many Cubans said Christmas Day 2015 could look a lot different from this one. All around Havana, they point to last week's announcement by Cuba and the United States as a sign that their situation, especially economically, could be changing quickly.

As more Americans come visit and invest in Cuba, people here said they will finally free themselves of the economic noose they've been in all these years.

Garcia said he wept as he watched Cuban President Raúl Castro speak at the same time as President Obama last week, announcing that the five-decade diplomatic thaw was finally over.

"I thought I was going to die before I heard that kind of announcement," he said. "It was a triumph of reason."

For Garcia and many on the island, the leaders' words gave them something more — faith.